Jennifer Brannigan
Graduate Studio Work
Spring 2017
As I’ve started to work on my practice through my fall semester some things have changed since the summer. For example, during the summer I geared my work towards the environment and our impact on nature. Specifically endangered birds and their diminishing numbers due to human progression and the pollution of water. As I have started to work this fall and spring I have looked to myself to make my work more personal to my experience as an educator, artist, and woman. I’ve always created settings that I thought were parallel to our own, with natural blues, greens, and browns, and layered images of pine trees and other natural and man-made occurrences. However, I have now looked at the land I now own as a main source of inspiration. Working hard for something that you and your partner have strived for often takes up a lot of mind space. As I am working, I think about where I am in my life and what’s important, in my opinion, to share.
Currently I am still very much interested in nature and our impact on it. I recently watched the documentary minimalism and how we really don’t need all of the things that we buy or consume. It started to make me question my artwork in relation to how I live my life. Am I creating worlds or fantasies that reflect what I want from my own personal life? I’m still trying to figure this out. I am excited to start working on my own piece of land and living holistically. My partner and I have decided, before anything else that we will start a garden to sustain ourselves that best way that we can. As I’ve started to work more on the property, I have thought about what influenced me to get to where I am today. What is important to me? Why is it important? I have been always been interested in my environment and I have now started to believe that all of the trees, mostly douglas furs, in my work have been influenced by my child hood. My childhood home had 32 pine trees that lined our front yard, I would wake up to them every morning, and I have always been attracted to how they look. It reminds me of some sort of enchanted forest and I’m proud that it’s mine. When I was a child I was always fascinated by the fantastical, and things that didn’t exist. I still am today. My work is a combination of what I see on my property, and creating layers upon layers to make each work feel dream like or other worldly.
I have been looking at artists that create site-specific work in an abstract way. I continue to look at Julie Mehretu, from the summer and I have recently found contemporary artist Heather Day, along with Katie Pumphrey and Yellena James. All of which have similar ideas or color components that make them visually and conceptually pleasing to me. I’ve been finding that creating on a daily basis, even on commission has put me in the same mindset of these ladies. Meaning, I am working on what is around me in a visual response that might be farther away from reality than I would have initially done. For the spring I have been investigating more artist, and the one that has impacted my work the most has been Emil Ferris and her groundbreaking graphic novel “My Favorite Things Are Monsters”. She uses all ballpoint pen to create really beautiful and layered drawings of art that you cannot look away from. I have started to also use ball point pen as it layers better under the washes of ink than charcoal or graphite would. It also creates really intricate drawings that don’t smudge or move.
As I move forward, I need to create art work either on site, or where ever I am in order to find out what I need to pursue, As I have mentioned earlier I recently watched the Minimalist Documentary and it impacted me in a way that I didn’t expect. I am curious about my own American dream and living in a way that reduces my carbon footprint, along with questions about why we live the way that we do. I will have to further my research in order to get a good grasp on all that I am thinking about currently.
Right now I am exploring what I have mentioned above, I unfortunately have not been able to make a larger piece of work about this, as much as I have dreamt about these ideas. It is something that will probably manifest itself naturally in my work. Working through paint, inks, and watercolor I am planning on moving my work in a more personal direction. I have looked at artist’s such as Heather Day to further my idea of documenting my life through a visual and abstract way. I am planning on using the land that I own, along with my life as an art educator to further this with extensions the real world with parallel components through out.
Through out the spring semester I have been working on layered ink washed art works that I work on simultaneously. My first paintings were small and I took a lot of pictures and chose areas that I thought would make cohesive compositions. I looked at the colors of the photo and exaggerated them with the ink washes. I even used metallics to add layers of dimension and a hazy or dream life quality to them. I uses the numbers that were meaningful to the property i.e geological coordinates, acreage, lot number etc. I found that is gave some of the works an industrial feel. This often happens when humans get involved in things, and I’m not sure if I will use them again as I move forward.
The second set of paintings were a little larger, and I found that I was making them too muddy by adding too much information to them. However, I did gather a lot of ideas to put into future art works. For one, I found that close up images or abstracted India ink trees work well visually, and it is something that is so predominate on the property that it need to be kept. No matter the time of day, some of the trees are always in the dark. The property was is an old Christmas tree farm, and a lot of the trees are close together. This also leads to really amazing little paths that look like little alley ways to new worlds. I also found that I need to either add the unorganized splatter, or the India ink, but not both together. Compositionally it looks too dark and over whelming.
The last painting that I’ve done I went larger and in a different direction. I started to use ball point pen to make the drawings that I was doing darker, more layered. It also helped that it didn’t smudge or disappear when I layered the ink over it. For the future, I am going to use more detailed drawings that almost come across as abstract, within my paintings. This brings the viewer into the work in a way that the washes didn’t. It slows down the eye and unlike the washes that would come across flat at times. As I move forward with my work, I’m going to make larger works that incorporate ideas from the property, detailed ball point pen drawings, and abstractions that are in references to what I experience in my life. I am going to use larger pieces of paper and abstract the drawing even more.
